I thought this might be about the saying I've heard a bunch recently, "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."
I've mostly heard it in the context of building and construction videos where they are approaching a new skill or technique and have to remind themselves to slow down.
Going slowly and being careful leads to fewer mistakes, which will be a "smoother" process and ends up taking less time, whereas going too fast and making mistakes means work has to be redone and ultimately takes longer.
On rereading it, I see some parallels: When one is trying to go too fast, and is possibly becoming impatient with their progress, their mental queue fills up and processing suffers. If one accepts a slower pace, one's natural single-tasking capability will work better, and they will make better progress as a result.
And maybe its just my selection bias working hard to confirm that he actually is talking about what I want him to say!
Very common. In fact, I think the hardest part of learning to play a musical instrument is the tendency to want to play at normal speed before you are ready. The idea that you can play something fast accurately when you can’t even play it slowly accurately is the classic mental and psychological conundrum.
There is a saying: “You don’t rise your level when performing. You fall to your level of practice.”
The saying is confusing and I would suggest makes the opposite claim. It’s common in sports. You practice at an uncomfortable pace to normalize it, even making mistakes, because if you can’t practice at game speed you won’t be able to compete at game speed. In that context there’s room for both, and I’d say the same for music—you need slow, deliberate practice and also reps in “performance” mode, and it’s probably too reductive to say you should “only” be doing either at any point in time.
What I find fascinating, is how much this concept scales to places it seems like it shouldn't. I had taken the idea to heart early in my life for anything that require dexterity. But it wasn't until mid career that I saw it work at an organizational level. At one point the team I was on stopped promising so much. We essentially decided to slow down. I don't quite remember what lead us to this mindset, though I know our weekly retrospectives were part of it (we had some really good retros, like I cry at the thought that I will likely never have that level of mutual trust in a team again). And, what was sort of unexpected, was that our velocity basically went up. We knew we wanted to make sure we focused on higher value items, and push back on low quality requests, but the amount of requests we could accommodate also went up along with the average value. I still don't fully understand the theory behind it, certainly we were using a lot of cycles on low value things, but just promising fewer deliverables allowed us to deliver more. I know that brains are bad at time slicing, but this seems to also expand to the organizational level too...
Isn't this essentially the idea behind agile? I'm not too deep into the agile theory, but the Phoenix project is always a very good read (albeit stressful if you work in software teams lol)
Yeah, the phrase goes back at least to Bill Miliken's monumental Race Car Vehicle Dynamics, where I first encountered it. The specific idea is that going slow(er) into a corner allows you to hit the apex precisely, optimally rotate the car, and get on the power sooner, which gets you a higher exit speed, which compounds all the way to the next corner. It's what fast drivers have done - probably since racing was done with horses - but it's counter-intuitive to beginners.
I've mostly heard it in the context of building and construction videos where they are approaching a new skill or technique and have to remind themselves to slow down.
Going slowly and being careful leads to fewer mistakes, which will be a "smoother" process and ends up taking less time, whereas going too fast and making mistakes means work has to be redone and ultimately takes longer.
On rereading it, I see some parallels: When one is trying to go too fast, and is possibly becoming impatient with their progress, their mental queue fills up and processing suffers. If one accepts a slower pace, one's natural single-tasking capability will work better, and they will make better progress as a result.
And maybe its just my selection bias working hard to confirm that he actually is talking about what I want him to say!